Let's Face It, Nothing Is Perfect The First Time Around
03-18-03- Showing Emotion and How That's Communication
Here's 7 pictures of the faces
that I've been filing and carving
after the first curing. There's thumbnails and links that go to
the "Before" pictures and then there's the filed faces.
There's some discussion on how we communicate with facial expressions
and tilts of the head. This is part of what I will be discussing on
Thursday and showing in Demo as well.
If we are to do sculptures of people who can communicate with just
their facial expressions, with the tilt of the head, we have captured
that which is the most basic of human communication. We have more
facial muscles than any primate. We devote a huge part of our brain
space to the massive data bank of faces we compare the faces we see
to the faces we know.
There's this fellow in England, had a car accident. He could
recognize faces but there was a disconnection of the emotional impact
that face had. So he perceived his mother as an "imposter", someone
who just looked like his mother, acted like his mother but was a
stranger to him.
There was this other situation when this American fellow had brain
surgery and he lost the ability to recognize faces at all. He
couldn't tell the difference between Doris Day and Hillary Clinton.
He couldn't pick out his children in a small group of teens. He has
to look at each feature separately and add them together, and guess
if that is his son or daughter.
Our ability to show emotion is the social glue that binds us. If we
couldn't return a smile, if we couldn't show surprise or
compassionate concern with a look, we loose a lot in what we are able
to express to others. When there's a language difference these facial
expressions are important cues as to whether someone is friend or
foe.
Our facial expressions tell others if we hold them in contempt. When
someone sees that wrinkling of a brow, that scowl, how ever slight,
it sets a number of chemicals going on in the body, all of which
prepare us to fight or flee. To be on the receiving end of that look
makes the recipients feel physically bad. It's unhealthy.
Japanese culture teaches us to "hold our face". For there are too
many people on too small a space that our emotions are private. We
have our duty to the group which is taught to us to be more important
than our personal feelings. This is now seen as harming Japanese
nationals ability to interact with people from cultures that are more
emotionally expressive. Classes are given to sales people to learn
how to smile, odd as that may seem, for it was shown that sales go up
30% if the clerk smiles.
Even if you're only make believing, laugh clown laugh. There's a
group of folks in India, actually about 600 groups world wide, who
meet every morning for a half an hour of laughing. At first it is
forced, after a minute you're really yucking it up. You end up
feeling good and it releases good chemicals in the brain and raises
resistance to disease. Those who don't laugh enough are prone to more
illnesses.
All this and more we'll be discussing on Thursday, but I wanted to
share with you the filed faces and make your sculpting effort a
little easier.
xoxo
NJ